Navigating the Politics of Muslim Neo-Traditionalist Shaykhs

Exploring tensions between traditional orientations and modern subjectivities, the pursuit of enchantment, and existing in a disenchanted, secular world, Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West examines neo-traditionalism, its public pedagogues and their students—seekers of sacred knowledge—in the Euro-American context. These pedagogues, many of whom are white converts to Islam such as Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, guide their followers through a paradigmatic critique of modernity. They focus on affirming spirituality, self-purification, and religious orthodoxy and advocate for a traditional metaphysical worldview along with recognition of and deference to spiritual (and political) authorities. This study examines the convergence of Muslim neo-traditionalists with the religious right and culture-war polemicists – on the one hand – and the role they have played alongside policymakers nationally and transnationally. On the national front, they argue for an alliance of conservative believers that provides the same paradigm shared by the so-called ‘moral majority’ and with which Muslims can unapologetically voice their concerns on the dissipation of family values and sexual politics.  Globally, they have contributed to forging a vision for a ‘moderate Islam’ after the War on Terror and promoted a counterrevolutionary and statist stance after the Arab Spring.

Bio:
Walaa Quisay is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics and co-author of When Only God can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners. She worked at numerous academic institutions, including the University of Manchester, the University of Birmingham, and Istanbul Şehir University. In 2019, she received her DPhil from the University of Oxford at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, the study of Muslim political and religious subjectivities, carceral theology, theodicy, and traditionalism and modernism in contemporary Islamic thought.

* Registration link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpc-uopjwuHtJMfD1YfePk_vh4RR...

** See the event poster:  2024-25.2.marmura.quisay.pdf